Hate Crime in Australia: An analysis of the views of police detainees

While minimal research has been conducted on hate crimes in Australia compared with other popular criminology topics, there has been an increased research focus on this type of crime in recent decades. High profile incidents such as the Cronulla riots have helped raise the issue of hate crimes onto the public agenda. Unfortunately, such crimes can also bring with them moral panics created by the media, helping distort the extent of this type of crime in Australia. Focussing specifically on racial, ethnic and religious hate crimes of a violent nature this study aims to examine the extent of hate crime offences and motivations of police detainees in Australia. Perry's (2001) doing difference' framework is used along with aspects of structuralist criminology theory to help conceptualise these types of hate crime. Many criminological studies have tended to focus on victims of hate crimes as opposed to offenders. This study has taken advantage of the opportunity to make offenders� the focus of the research. The sample group is comprised of detainees who are participants in the Australian Institute of Criminology's Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) project. A series of questions surrounding hate crime offending, and to a lesser extent victimisation, were developed and asked of 965 detainees from around Australia. After a primary analysis of the data the results identified few offenders, yet a large proportion of detainees reported hate crime victimisation. While findings were unexpected, in that few hate crime offenders were recorded among a sample of police detainees, this study helps explore the topic of hate crime in Australia utilising a seldom used participant sample.